ROBERT Frost has been Essay Example For Students

ROBERT Frost has been Essay discovering America all hislife. He has also beendiscovering the world; andsince he is a really wisepoet, the one thing has beenthe same thing as the other. He is more than a NewEngland poet: he is morethan an American poet; heis a poet who can beunderstood anywhere byreaders versed in mattersmore ancient and universalthan the customs of onecountry, whatever thatcountry is. Frosts countryis the country of humansense: of experience, ofimagination, and ofthought. His poems start athome, as all good poemsdo; as Homers did, asShakespeares, asGoethes, and asBaudelaires; but they endup everywhere, as only thebest poems do. This ispartly because his wisdomis native to him, and could not have been suppressed by any circumstance; it ispartly, too, because his education has been right. He is our least provincial poetbecause he is the best grounded in those ideasGreek, Hebrew, modernEuropeans and even Orientalwhich make for well-built art at any time. He doesnot parade his learning, and may in fact not know that he has it: but there in hispoems it is, and it is what makes them so solid, so humorous, and so satisfying. His many poems have been different from one another and yet alike. They are thework of a man who has never stopped exploring himselfor, if you like, America,or better yet, the world. He has been able to believe, as any good artist must, thatthe things he knows best because they are his own will turn out to be true for otherpeople. He trusts his own feelings, his own doubts, his own certainties, his ownexcitements. And there is absolutely no end to these, given the skill he needs tostate them and the strength never to be wearied by his subject matter. The objectin writing poetry Frost has said, is to make all poems sound as different aspossible from each other. But for this, in addition to the tricks any poet knows,we need the help of contextmeaningsubject matter. That is the greatest helptowards variety. All that can be done with words is soon told. So also with meters. . . . The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across therigidity of a limited meter are endless. And we are back in poetry as merely onemore art of having something to say, sound or unsound. Probably better if sound,because deeper and from wider experience.Frost is one of the most subtle of modern poets in that department where so muchcriticism rests, the department called technique; but the reason for his subtlety isseldom noticed. It is there because it has to be, in the service of somethinginfinitely more important: a report of the world by one who lives in it without anycause to believe that he is different from other persons except for the leisure he hasgiven himself to walk about and think as well as possible concerning all the thingshe sees; and to take accurate note of the way they strike him as he looks. What theyare in themselves is not to be known; or who he is, either, if all his thought is ofhimself; but when the two come together in a poem, testimony may result. This iswhat Frost means by subject matter, and what any poet had better mean if heexpects to be read. Frost is more and more read, by old readers and by young, because in this crucialand natural sense he has so much to say. He is a generous poet. His book confidesmany discoveries, and shares with its readers a world as wild as it is wideadangerous world, hard to live in, yet the familiar world that is the only one weshall ever have, and that we can somehow love for the bad things in it as well asthe good, the unintelligible as well as the intelligible. Frost is a laconic New Englander: that is to say, he talks more than anybody. Hetalks all the time. The inhabitants of New England accuse one another of talkingtoo much, but all are guilty together, all are human; for man is a talking animal,and never more so than when he is trying to prove that silence is best. Frost hasexpressed the virtue of silence in hundreds of poems, each one of them moreingenious than the last in the way it takes of suggesting that it should not have beenwritten at all. The greatest people keep still. There may be little or much beyond the grave,But the strong are saying nothing until they see. Joking aside, Frost is a generous giver. He is not, thank heaven, one of thoseexiguous modern poetsJoseph Wood Krutch has called them costivewho hopeto be loved because they have delivered so little: the fewer the poems the better thepoet. The fact is that the greatest poets have been, among other things, prolific:they have had much to say, and nothing has prevented them from keeping at it tillthey died. Contrary to a certain legend, good poets get better with age, as Thomas Hardy foranother instance did. The Collected Poems of Hardy are a universe through whichthe reader may travel forever, entertained as he goes by the same paradox as thatwhich appears in the Complete Poems of Frost: the universe in question ispresented as a grim, bleak place, but the longer one stares at it the warmer itseems, and the more capable of justifying itself beneath the stars. By an almostillicit process it manages in the end to sing sweetly of itselfnot sentimentally, oras if it leaned upon illusion, but with a deep sweetness that truth cannot disturb. Similarities Between Poe's Life And His Works EssayFrost never says these things either; his poems only suggest them, and suggestfurther things that contradict them. His muse, like the truth, is cantankerous; itkeeps on turning up fresh evidence against itself. And yet we cannot miss thealways electric presence of oppositiontwo things or persons staring at each otheracross some kind of wall. Frost has no interest in doors that do not lock, in friendswho do not know they are enemies too, or in enemies who do not know how topretend they are friends, and even believe it as far as things can go. His drumlinwoodchuck sits forth from his habitation like one who invites the world to comeand visit him; but he never forgets the two-door burrow at his back. So Frosthimself can reflect upon the triple bronze that guards him from infinity: his skin,his house, and his country. If he is greatly interested in the stars, and no poet ismore so, the reason is that they are another world which he can see from this one,and accept or challenge as the mood of the moment dictates. They burn in theirplaces as he burns in his, and it is just as well that neither fire can consume theother; yet each of them is a fire, and secretly longs to mingle with its far neighbor. The great thing about man for Frost is that he has the power of standing still wherehe is. He is on the earth, and it is only one of many places, and perhaps everyother place is better. But this is his place, where in spite of his longing to leave ithe can stay till his time comes. Like any other distinguished person, Frost lives intwo worlds at once: this one, and another one which only makes it more attractive. The superiority of the other one is what proves the goodness of the one we have,which doggedly we keep on loving, as doggedly it tolerates and educates us if welet it do so. Wisdom is enduring it exactly as it is; courage is being familiar with itand afraid of it in the right proportions; temperance is the skill to let it be; andjustice is the knowledge that between it and you there will always be a loversquarrel, never to die into cold silence and never to be made up. The main thing isthe mutual respect. Not that Frost wants us to think he knows everything. If, as they say, some dust thrown in my eyes Will keep my talk from getting overwise, Im not the one for putting off the proof. Let it be overwhelming, off a roof And round a corner, blizzard snow for dust, And blind me to a standstill if it must. His vision is the comic vision that doubts even itself. But it remembers all it can ofwhat it always knew, and rests, in so far as the mind can ever rest, on the sum ofits memories. The comic genius ignores nothing that seems true, howeverinconvenient it may be for something else that seems as true. The groundwork of all faith is human woe. . . . Theres nothing but injustice to be had,No choice is left a poet you might add, But how to take the curse, tragic or comic. The choice of Frost is clear. His humor, an indispensable thing in any great poet,is in his case the sign that he has decided to see everything that he can see. No manof course sees all the world, but the poorest man is the one who blinds himself. The man with his eyes open has the best chance to understand things, includingthose things his ancestors have said. The minister says of the old lady who used tolive in The Black Cottage:One wasnt long in learning that she thought Whatever else the Civil War was for, It wasnt just to keep the States together, Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both. She wouldnt have believed those ends enough To have given outright for them all she gave. Her giving somehow touched the principleThat all men are created free and equal. And to hear her quaint phrasesso removed From the worlds view today of all those things. Thats a hard mystery of Jeffersons. What did he mean? Of course the easy way Is to decide it simply isnt true. It may not be. I heard a fellow say so. But never mind, the Welshman got it plantedWhere it will trouble us a thousand years. Each age will have to reconsider it. . . . For, dear me, why abandon a belief Merely because it ceases to be true. Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt It will turn true again, for so it goes. Most of the change we think we see in life Is due to truths being in and out of favor. There it is. One couldnt say half so much if one were tragic. FroastCopyright 1951 by Mark Van Doren. Permission to reproduce granted by Charles and John Van Doren, executors. Allrights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; June, 1951; Robert Frosts America; Volume 187, No. 6; pages 32-34.